Globally, over 240 million children are out of school, and many more attend classrooms without acquiring foundational literacy and numeracy skills. In India, despite high enrolment, many children—especially in rural areas—struggle with basic reading, comprehension, and application. This crisis is deeper among migrant and vulnerable communities, where disruptions and limited support hinder continuity. At the same time, education systems remain largely top-down, limiting community ownership and failing to build agency or real-world relevance.
Our experience shows education is closely tied to nutrition, migration, and social norms, yet communities—especially women—are excluded from shaping these systems. The CORE Learning Ecosystem addresses this by positioning education as a community-owned process. By enabling women as educators and embedding learning within local contexts, it strengthens educational outcomes, leadership, and community resilience for sustainable development.
In practice, the CORE Learning Ecosystem operates through decentralized Village Learning Labs—safe, community-anchored spaces that go beyond classrooms. These hubs integrate learning, leadership, and community engagement on a single platform. At the core is a women-led model where local women are trained as educators and facilitators, supported by a blend of digital tools and in-person methods to ensure quality and contextual relevance. Technology complements human interaction through a “dual-teacher” approach.
Learning extends beyond textbooks to include foundational literacy and numeracy, life skills, communication, and real-world problem-solving rooted in local contexts. Children engage through interactive, activity-based methods that make learning meaningful. Women educators also work closely with families, strengthening trust and participation.
Each lab serves as a platform for broader community development—enabling dialogue on social issues, improving access to services, and promoting wellbeing. Over time, communities co-create solutions, becoming active drivers of their own development.
CORE has evolved from open-air classes with migrant children in Delhi into a women-led, grassroots learning ecosystem across four regions in India, spanning urban and rural communities. It now reaches 600+ children through 30+ trained women educators, operating in 3 urban pavement learning centers and 9 village learning labs. Each center is built locally by identifying, training, and mentoring women from within the community, ensuring expansion strengthens ownership rather than dependency.
Its growth is driven by improved learning outcomes, higher retention, community trust, and the visible transformation of women into confident educators and leaders. Supported by a structured curriculum and digital tools, the model remains adaptable across contexts. As women progress, they mentor others and help establish new centers, creating a self-sustaining leadership pipeline. CORE thus scales as a community-owned system, with each center acting as a nucleus for long-term impact.
This is a new innovation we are submitting.
To implement the CORE model, the starting point is not infrastructure, but community engagement and trust-building. The process begins by identifying a village or underserved community and creating a safe, accessible learning space that brings children together. At the same time, local women are identified and engaged—not based on formal qualifications, but on their potential to lead and their commitment to the community. They are then supported through continuous, hands-on mentoring to become educators and facilitators, with training focused on foundational teaching practices, classroom facilitation, community engagement, and the use of basic digital tools. A structured yet flexible curriculum, supported by simple digital systems, helps ensure quality learning while allowing adaptation to local contexts. As the model evolves, the learning space expands beyond academics to become a community platform—engaging parents, fostering youth aspirations, enabling dialogue on local issues, and linking families to existing government systems and opportunities. The key is to grow gradually and organically—from a single learning space into a women-led, community-owned ecosystem—where local leadership drives sustainability, scale, and long-term impact.
